Different writing around the world

Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, c. If asked to think of language scripts apart from Latin and Cyrillic, you might think of Arabic and Korean hangul, which are both segmental scriptsor the Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji, hiragana and katakana yes Japanese does indeed have at least 3 scripts!

They can also dictate to you what they remember about each country. But before the Greeks added vowels to constitute their own alphabet, a number of writing systems made purely of consonants surfaced in different cultures, such as the ancient Hebrew and the Aramaic alphabets which, in turn, influenced the Arabic alphabet.

Replace the latin letters in this example with images, and you get the functional writing system of the ancient Egyptians! Latin is a descendant of the script used by ancient Romans, which, in its turn, descends from Egyptian hieroglyphics by way of the Phoenicians, Greeks and Etruscans.

Of course, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic are but three of the hundreds of scripts or writing systems that exist or have existed around the world. They love learning about the way other children live, their family dynamics, the way they celebrate holidays, and even the way their school days are structured.

You can see similar patterns in the former Yugoslavia where Croatia mainly uses the Latin script while, officially, Serbia and Montenegro favour Cyrillic script, though popular media in these countries makes increasing use of Latin script.

It evolved from pictographs small images representing objects in language and eventually adopted the rebus principle, which is when specific shapes are read as objects or a sound. The invention of writing some 5, years ago is probably one of the greatest achievements of humankind.

Understanding different writing systems of the world is a mental workout for anyone who has grown used to the Latin alphabet. One kind of writing system is pictographic, made up of ideograms that convey an idea or concept, and has a very modern example in the form of emojis.

For example, to write what we call Chinese, you have two main scripts — Simplified and Traditional. There are differing opinions as to why people felt the need to write.

So they chose some Semitic consonants to represent Greek consonants and then used the extra Semitic consonant symbols for Greek vowels.

Cyrillic script is believed to have originated in Bulgaria in the 9th century and is based on older Greek and Cyrillic scripts, undergoing reform in the 18th century under the influence of Peter the Great.

Thus, the Greek alphabet was the first alphabet that included symbols to represent vowels. Shares 5K My kids love learning about the lives of other children around the world. Preschoolers can color and trace the sentence at the bottom of the page.

It consisted of 22 letters and was written from right to left, occasionally in boustrophedon right to left, then left to right on the following line, and so on.

Interestingly, while Taiwan and Hong Kong both use the Traditional Chinese script, they are using it to write the Mandarin and Cantonese spoken languages respectively. Featural Writing Systems If one considers the development of writing systems to indicate progress a debate for another articlewhat would the next step after phonetic alphabets be?

Another script that is very common is the Devanagari script, which is used by over languages including Hindi, Nepali, Sanskrit and Marathi.

So when did we first arrive at a purely phonetic alphabet, with one letter representing one sound? Symbols were scratched on flat clay tablets with a squared-off stick which left wedge-shaped marks in the clay.

The Greeks felt that they needed symbols for representing vowels. What kind of clothing do they wear? The Urdu script, like the Perso-Arabic script, is derived from the Arabic script and is used, as the name suggests, for writing Urdu.

It was used for non-religious purposes until the 18th century, when it completely replaced Khutsuri. Cyrillic became one of the three official scripts of the European Union in when Bulgaria joined the EU and in went on to join the two other scripts, Latin and Greek used by Greeks and Coptic Egyptianson EU bank notes.

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Montenegro, was seeing these familiar yet unfamiliar names on the shelves of a former hammam which had been converted into a bookshop.

It eventually matured into a full blown writing system of word-signs and phonograms after B. Alpha-Syllabaries Or Abugidas What if your language is a clear mix of consonant sounds ending in a vowel sound, organized in sound blocks that we call syllables?

Well, just like the phonetic specificities of Egyptian influenced its writing system, a language composed purely of discrete syllables is ripe for a syllabic system of writing. While scripts still in use in Europe are few in number, around the world scripts come in all shapes and sizes. Most of the systems discussed earlier in this article are true alphabets with symbols representing vowels and consonants.

Well, not completely, since Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Arabic include matres lectionis mothers of readingsymbols that may mark the presence of a vowel or function as a consonant, depending on context.

These additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not represented in the Greek script.The beauty of typography has no borders. While most of us work with the familiar Latin alphabet, international projects usually require quite extensive knowledge about less familiar writing systems from around the world.

Writing has been around for over years, but there is wide variety in the unique writing systems of the world. We look at the history of writing, separating myth from fact, and follow its myriad threads to the four distinct systems in use today. Chinese writing is the oldest system in the world that has hardly changed in the last 4, years.

It is thought to have originated as pictures around 2, BC. The earliest known logographs, or pictograms, were inscribed on oracle bones. My kids love learning about the lives of other children around the world. They love learning about the way other children live, their family dynamics, the way they celebrate holidays, and even the way their school days are structured.

Of course, different communities and countries also use different scripts to write the same language. For example, Muslims in India use a form of Perso-Arabic script called Shahmukhi to write Punjabi, whereas other communities use a script called Gurmukhī.

About Writing Around the World Cultures use different writing strategies because they strive for different goals. Some cultures rely on writer responsibility while other cultures rely on reader responsibility.